The Heuristics Debate

Abstract

Researchers associated with the “Heuristics and Biases” (H&B) school and those who view heuristics as “Fast and Frugal” (F&F) problem-solving methods share much in common. They agree that people frequently and quite reasonably use heuristics, making factual judgments or reaching decisions about what actions best serve their ends without making use of all potentially relevant information or computational abilities. This book focuses, though, on the distinctions between the two schools. Echoing the conventional rational choice model, H&B researchers suggest that people make decisions by assessing the probability that certain outcomes will follow a particular action and by evaluating each of these possible outcomes. Unlike rational choice theorists, these researchers emphasize that people, facing a range of cognitive limitations, will not always make accurate judgments even if they have perfect information and explain, as well, why evaluations are sensitive to the ways in which preferences are elicited. F&F scholars claim instead that the key source of the use of heuristics is not our computational incapacity but our evolved capacity to make use of appropriate environmentally available cues. People’s judgments are typically ecologically, if not logically, rational in the sense that our judgments meet our actual goals, if not the demands of classical rational choice theory. Moreover, while rational choice theorists extol judgment and decision making processes in which decision makers weigh multiple cues and factors, and H&B theorists believe our incapacity to perform such multifactor balancing poses problems, F&F theorists believe, descriptively, that we typically use lexical decision making processes and, normatively, that doing so typically leads us to make better judgments. These disputes have bite. Policymakers will have very different ideas about what we must do to induce greater law compliance or insure that consumers can make decisions in their interests, and they will evaluate the propriety of cost-benefit analysis or the virtues of a rule-bound legal system differently depending on how they resolve these very basic questions about the flaws, virtues, and nature of heuristic reasoning.

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